ios/substack draft

A love letter to my process 

Feels a bit tacky to write so much about writing. But this is an internal feeling. Most of my substack audience wouldn’t mind, or even notice. In fact there‘a probably a significant subset of readers who’d like it if I made my entire substack be about writing– as a marketing guy I know that it would be lucrative in a sense. You grow your audience faster when you’re targeting a clear and specific niche. It’s easier to say yes to.

But my process won’t allow that. And I’m often fighting my process and feeling quite guilty about it. What does my process really want? Well a part of it wants everything. It wants to be sublime and mundane, prosaic and profound, you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around 

My friend Tiago likes to say that perfectionism is fear with an excuse

I don’t think I’m super perfectionist. I shipped both of my ebooks in states of incomplete. So clearly my process is okay with things being incomplete. But they have to be good. They have to be compelling in some way. A bumpy road is tolerable if it gets to an interesting destination

But the problem is I can’t quite just pick a destination. I have literally hundreds of drafts lying around. And if a friend asked me for advice I’d say don’t think so hard about it, just ship something. But… am I a hypocrite? Maybe a little bit! But I don’t think it’s just that. I think sometimes when you have a contradiction it’s because there’s something more complex happening that you just don’t understand yet. And it’s the illusion of understanding that will really mess you up. So that’s what I strive for. Understanding. If 

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looking back over the past 20+ years of my journalling and reflection I think one of the most core central challenges has been something like insubordination 

I do a lot of my best writing…

pacing a small stretch in my house between my kitchen and the front door. Trying to resist this seems unwise.

I’m 32 years old

fun thing is I can now say I’ve been writing for decades

Started with digimon poetry 

I’m not a fan of the word procrastination

I find it to be a clunky and cumbersome word. it’s kind of like the word masturbation

I been struggling to write a second post for my suvsradk and I haven’t really taken the time to ask why

I think it’s because of the gulf between my reality and my expectations, hopeful idealistic naive

I spend a lot of time sitting around agonising about my writing. That sounds dramatic. Okay it’s not that dramatic. But a lot of my writing takes place in my head in a place that I don’t have a lot of clarity about. And I have spent a long time trying to shine a light down there in that dusty cellar and it doesn’t work

I think I just gotta make my peace with it

My writing style has always been confessional and I think a part of me loves it and a part of me hates it. Maybe like how women feel about their bodies

I haven’t really properly introduced myself, have I? And yet sometimes it feels like that’s all I ever do, just continually introduce and reintroduce myself over and over again. It’s boring. And I think the biggest crime in writing is to be bored, to be boring. I wrote an entire book with the intention of understanding what the fuck boredom even is so I might never be bored again. I think I succeeded at understanding boredom but that doesn’t mean I’ve defeated it permanently. It can’t be and we shouldn’t really try(?). 

✱ 

2022nov18: I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about how to write a set of essays that I would be really proud of. It’s been my dominant preoccupation, which is somewhat questionable from a cost-benefit standpoint.

I do quite a bit of my thinking by writing – I don’t just sit around daydreaming (although that’s absolutely a critical part of my process), I have tens of thousands of words spread across dozens of drafts and notes.

I don’t know if I want to share this (essay draft) publicly. This is shaping up to feel like a behind-the-scenes document. I do want to weave in some behind-the-scenes content into my work, but I want it to be a deliberate choice on my part. This doesn’t quite feel like the right move at this point. I might share it with some friends. So maybe I should be writing it in a google docs instead. But I’m already here (in the Substack text editor) and I want to get more cosy with it, so I’ll continue here, and maybe copy it out later.

I was going through some old notes and I found one from 2021 where I was introspecting about my book-writing process and how I was struggling with it because I didn’t quite scope it properly. I was too ambitious, I wanted to do too much. I bit off more than I can chew. Slightly annoying thing about me is that I almost can’t bring myself to work on something unless it’s more than I can chew. It’s almost like I need to manufacture crises in order to keep myself interested. Which is probably correlated with my ADHD complex/cluster of traits, but that’s not what I want to be talking about here…

A part of me does believe that writing should be fun and effortless. I’d like to be luxuriating in my words, enjoying myself. If I haven’t been doing that much lately, it’s probably because I’ve been getting into a tyrannical state of mind, trying to force myself to do something that I don’t particularly feel like doing. This is a tricky mess to navigate, I wrote a whole book about it.